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WHAT MAKES A LEADER?

Back when I was his graduate student at Harvard, David McClelland created a minor storm by publishing a controversial article in the main journal of our profession, the American Psychologist. McClelland reviewed data questioning a hallowed assumption: that doing well in school in itself predicted career success. He recognized the strong evidence that IQ is the best predictor of what kind of job any given high school student can eventually hold; the score sorts people into workplace roles quite well. Academic abilities (and the IQ they roughly reflect) signal what level of cognitive complexity someone can handle, and so what kind of job. You need to be approximately a standard deviation above average in intelligence (an IQ of 115) to be a professional or high-level executive, for instance. But what’s little discussed (at least in academic circles, where it’s less apparent) is that once you are at work among a pool of colleagues who are about as smart as you are, your cognitive abilities alone do not make you outstanding—particularly as a leader. There’s a floor effect for IQ when everyone in the group is at the same high level. McClelland argued that once you were in a given job, specific competencies like self-discipline, empathy, and persuasion were far stronger forces in success than a person’s ranking in academics. He proposed the methodology that has become competence modeling—now common in world-class organizations—for identifying the key abilities that made someone a star performer in a specific organization. The article, “Testing for Competence Rather Than Intelligence,” was well received among those in organizations who day to day actually evaluated on-the-job performance and had to decide whom to promote, who was the most effective leader, and what talents to groom promising people for. They had hard business metrics for success and failure, and knew that people’s grades and the prestige of the schools they went to had little or nothing to do with their actual effectiveness. As the former head of a major bank told me, “I was hiring the best and the brightest, but I was still seeing a bell-shaped curve for success and wondering why.” McClelland had the explanation. But the article was controversial among many academics, some of whom could not grasp that doing well in their courses had little to do with how their students would perform once in a job (unless that job was, say, being a college professor).1 Now, decades after that controversial article, competence models tell a clear story: nonacademic abilities like empathy typically outweigh purely cognitive talents in the makeup of outstanding leaders.2 In a study done at Hay Group (which has absorbed McBer, the company McClelland himself founded, and which calls a research division the McClelland Institute), leaders who showed strengths in eight or more of these noncognitive competencies had created highly energizing, top-performing climates.3 But Yvonne Sell, the Hay Group’s director of the leadership and talent practice in the United Kingdom, who did the study, found such leaders are rare: only 18 percent of executives attained this level. Three-quarters of leaders with three or fewer strengths in people skills created negative climates, where people felt indifferent or demotivated. Lame leadership seems all too prevalent—more than half of leaders fell within this low-impact category.4 Other studies point to the same hard case for soft skills. When Accenture interviewed one hundred CEOs about the skills they needed to run a company successfully, a set of fourteen abilities emerged, from thinking globally and creating an inspiring shared vision to embracing change and tech savvy.5 No one person could have them all. But there was one “meta” ability that emerged: self-awarexecutives need this ability to assess their own strengths and weaknesses, and so surround themselves with a team of people whose strengths in those core abilities complement their own. And yet self-awareness rarely shows up in those lists of competencies that organizations come up with by analyzing the strengths of their star performers.6 This subtle variety of focus may be too elusive, though abilities reflecting high cognitive control, which builds on this foundation of self-awareness, are frequent, and include persistence, resilience, and the drive to achieve goals. Empathy in its many forms, from simple listening to reading the paths of influence in an organization, shows up more often in leadership competence studies. Most of the competencies for high-performing leaders fall into a more visible category that builds on empathy: relationship strengths like influence and persuasion, teamwork and cooperation, and the like. But these most visible leadership abilities build not just on empathy, but also on managing ourselves and sensing how what we do affects others. The singular focusing ability that allows systems understanding goes under names that vary from organization to organization and competence model to model: big-picture view, pattern recognition, and systems thinking among them. It includes the ability to visualize the dynamics of complex systems and foresee how a decision at one point will ramify to create an effect at a distant one, or sense how what we do today will matter in five weeks, or in months, years, or decades. The challenge for leaders goes beyond having strengths in all three kinds of focus. The key is finding balance, and using the right one at the right time. The well-focused leader balances the data streams each offers, weaving these strands into seamless action. Putting together data on attention with that on emotional intelligence and performance, this triple focus emerges as a hidden driver of excellence. FINDING THE RIGHT BALANCE

Take any working group and ask the members, “Who is the leader?” and they’ll be likely to name whoever has the fitting job title. Now ask them, “Who is the most influential person in your group?” The answer to that identifies the informal leader, and tells you how that group actually operates. These informal leaders are more self-aware than their teammates: they tend to have the smallest gap between their own ratings of their abilities and those by others.7 University of New Hampshire psychologist Vanessa Druskat, who did this study, says, “Informal leaders often emerge in a temporary way, and switch in and out. For our research we ask, ‘Who would you say is the informal leader most of the time?’ ” If that informal leader has strengths in empathy in balance with other abilities, the research shows, the team’s performance tends to be higher. “If the leader has low empathy,” Druskat told me, “and a high level of achievement drive, the leader’s goal-orientation drags down the team performance. But, importantly, if the leader has high levels of empathy and low levels of self-control, performance is also reduced—too much empathy gets in the way of calling people on their misbehaving.” A bank officer tells me, “I’m in financial services, and I never used the word empathy at work—until now. The key is tying it to our strategy: employee engagement, good customer experience. Empathy is a way to differentiate us from our competitors. Listening is key.” She’s in good company; I heard the same message from the CEOs of the Mayo Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic, two of the world’s preeminent hospitals. And the CEO of one of the world’s largest money management firms tells me that the most ambitious of business school grads apply for jobs at his company, motivated by visions of huge salaries. But, he lamented, he was looking for people “who care about the widows and retired firemen whose life savings we manage”—in other words, an empathic focus that includes the humanity of those whose money is at stake. On the other hand, a single-minded focus on people is not enough. Take an executive who had started out as a forklift operator, working his way up to head of manufacturing for Asia at a global manufacturing company. Despite his lofty role, chatting with workers on the factory floor was where he felt most comfortable. He knew he should be doing strategic thinking, but he preferred being a “people person.” “He didn’t have the right balance between his other focus and outer focus,” says Spreier. “He was misfocused, and he wasn’t coming up with strategy well. He didn’t enjoy it—intellectually he knew he should, but emotionally he just was not there. There may be a neural challenge for getting the right balance between focusing on hitting a target and sensing how others are reacting. My longtime colleague Richard Boyatzis tells me his research at Case Western Reserve shows that the neural network that engages when we focus on a goal differs from the circuitry for social scanning. “They inhibit each other,” says Boyatzis. “The most successful leaders cycle back and forth between these within seconds.” Of course companies need leaders who beam in on getting better results. But those results will be more robust in the long run when leaders don’t simply tell people what to do or just do it themselves, but have an other focus: they are motivated to help other people be successful, too. They realize, for instance, that if someone lacks a given strength today, they can work to develop it. Such leaders take the time to mentor and advise. In practical terms all this means: • Listening within, to articulate an authentic vision of overall direction that energizes others even as it sets clear expectations. • Coaching, based on listening to what people want from their life, career, and current job. Paying attention to people’s feelings and needs, and showing concern. • Listening to advice and expertise; being collaborative and making decisions by consensus when appropriate. • Celebrating wins, laughing, knowing that having a good time together is not a waste of time but a way to build emotional capital.

These leadership styles, used in tandem or as appropriate to the moment, widen a leader’s focus to draw on inner, other, and outer inputs. That maximal bandwidth, and the wider understanding and flexibility of response it affords, can pay dividends. Research by the McClelland Institute on these leadership styles shows that more adept leaders draw on these as appropriate—each represents a unique focus and application. The wider a leader’s repertoire of styles, the more energized the organization’s climate and the better the results.8 APERTURE

The head of a health company was assessing a group of forty-plus managers whom he was directing in a new job. In a meeting where each stood up to raise issues, he noticed carefully how the other managers paid attention to the person speaking. Everyone was riveted on one manager and really listening, he saw, while when another stood up to speak peoples’ eyes went down to their tables—a sure sign that he had lost them. Emotional aperture, the ability to perceive such subtle cues in a group, operates a bit like a camera. We can zoom in to focus on one person’s feelings, or zoom out to take in the collective—whether a classroom or a work group. For leaders, aperture ensures a more accurate reading, for example, of support or antagonism for a proposal. Reading it well can mean the difference between a failed initiative and a helpful midcourse correction.9 Picking up telltale emotional cues such as tone of voice, facial expressions, and the like at a group level can tell you, for instance, how many in a group are feeling fear or anger, how many hope and positivity—or contempt and indifference. Those cues give a quicker and more true assessment of the group’s feelings than, say, asking what they are feeling. At work, collective emotions—sometimes called organizational climate—make a huge difference in, for example, customer service, absenteeism, and group performance in general. A more nuanced sense of the range of emotions in a group—how many feel fear, hope, and the rest of the emotional gamut—can help a leader make decisions that transform fear to hope or contempt to positivity. One hurdle in such a wide-aperture view, it turns out, is the implicit attitude at work that professionalism demands we ignore our emotions. Some trace this emotional blind spot to the work ethic embedded in the norms of workplaces in the West, which sees work as a moral obligation that demands suppressing attention to our relationships and what we feel. In this all-too-common view, paying attention to these human dimensions undermines business effectiveness. But organizational research over the last decades provides ample evidence that this is a misguided assumption, and that the most adept team membea wide aperture to gather the emotional information they need to deal well with their teammates’ or employees’ emotional needs. Whether we notice the emotional forest or just zero in on one tree determines our aperture. When people saw cartoons depicting, for example, one person smiling surrounded by others frowning, eye-tracking devices revealed that most viewers narrowed their attention to just the smiling face, ignoring the others.10 There seems to be a bias (at least among college students in the West, who are the bulk of subjects in such studies in psychology) to ignore the larger collective. In East Asian society, by contrast, people more naturally take in broad patterns in a group—a wide aperture comes easily. Leadership maven Warren Bennis uses the term “first-class noticers” for those who bring a finely honed attention to every situation, and a constant, sometimes infectious sense of fascination with what’s going on in the moment. Great listeners are one variety of first-class noticers. Two of the main mental ruts that threaten the ability to notice are unquestioned assumptions and overly relied-on rules of thumb. These need to be tested and refined time and again against changing realities. One way to do this is through what Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer calls environmental mindfulness: constant questioning and listening; inquiry, probing, and reflecting—gathering insights and perspectives from other people. This active engagement leads to smarter questions, better learning, and a more sensitive early warning radar for coming changes. THE SYSTEMS BRAIN

Consider an executive identified in a study of those in government posts whose track record marked them as innovative, successful leaders.11 His first job for the navy was in a ship’s radio room. He soon mastered the radio system and, he said, “I knew it better than anyone on the ship. I was the one they came to with problems. But I realized that if I was going to be a success I had to master the ship.” So he applied himself to learning how the different parts of the ship worked together, and how each interacted with the radio room. Later in his career, when he got promoted to a much bigger job as a civilian working for the navy, he said, “Just as I mastered the radio room, and then the ship, I realized I had to master how the navy works.” While some of us have a knack for systems, for many or most leaders—like this executive—it is an acquired strength. But systems awareness in the absence of self-awareness and empathy will not be sufficient for outstanding leadership. We need to balance the triple focus, not depend on having just one strength. Now consider the Larry Summers paradox: he no doubt has a genius IQ and brilliance as a systems thinker. He was, after all, one of the youngest professors to get tenure in Harvard’s history. But years later Summers was, in effect, fired as Harvard president by its faculty, who were fed up with his insensitive blunders—most notably dismissing women’s capabilities for science. That pattern seems to fit what the University of Oxford’s Simon Baron-Cohen has identified as an extreme brain style, one that excels at systems analysis but flunks empathy and the sensitivity to social context that comes along with it.12 Baron-Cohen’s research finds that in a small—but significant—number of people this strength comes coupled with a blind spot for what other people are feeling and thinking, and for reading social situations. For that reason, while people with superior systems understanding are organizational assets, they are not necessarily effective leaders if they lack the requisite emotional intelligence. An executive at one bank explained to me how the bank has created a career ladder for those with this talent set that allows them to progress in status and salary on the basis of their solo talents as brilliant systems analysts rather than by climbing the leadership ranks. That way the bank can keep this talented crew and have them advance in their career, while recruiting leaders from a different pool. Those leaders can then consult their systems expertise as needed. THE WELL-FOCUSED TEAM

At an international organization people were hired solely for their technical expertise, without regard for their personal or interpersonal abilities—including teamwork. Perhaps predictably, a one-hundred-member team there had a breakdown with lots of friction and constant missed deadlines. “The head of the team never had the chance to stop and reflect with someone,” I was told by the leadership coach who was brought in to help. “He didn’t have a single friend he could talk to openly. When I gave him the opportunity for reflection, we started with his dreams, then his problems. “When we stepped back to look at his team he realized he’d been seeing everything through a single small lens—how they were constantly disappointing him—but hadn’t been thinking about why people were behaving the way they were. He had no perspective-taking; he couldn’t see things from the team members’ point of view.” The team leader focused his thinking on what was wrong with the members, their specific failings, and his indignation that they were torpedoing his own performance. He found it easy to blame their shortcomings. But once he was able to shift his focus to the team’s perspective on what wasn’t working, his diagnosis of the trouble changed. He realized that resentments among team members were rampant. The theory-oriented basic scientists disdained the more pragmatic, get-it-done engineers, who in turn put down what they saw as head-in-the-clouds researchers. Another variety of strife was nationalistic. The huge team was like a tiny United Nations, with members drawn from countries around the world—a goodly number of which were in conflict with each other—and those conflicts mapped onto many of the tensions between people. The group rhetoric was that these divides didn’t exist (and so we can’t talk about it)—but in fact, the head of the team saw, he needed to get it out on the table. “So that’s where he started to put things right,” his coach said. Vanessa Druskat finds that top-performing teams follow norms that enhance the collective self-awareness, such as by surfacing simmering disagreements and settling them before they boil over. One resource for dealing with the team’s emotions: create time and space to talk about what’s on people’s mind. Druskat’s research, done with Steven Wolff, finds that many teams don’t do this—it’s the least frequently demonstrated norm of those they study. “But if a team does this,” she says, “there’s a large positive payoff. “I was in North Carolina working with a team, and the resource we used to help them discuss emotion-laden issues was a large ceramic elephant,” Druskat told me. “They all agreed to a norm that said, ‘Anyone, anytime, can pick up the elephant and say, “I want to raise an elephant,” ‘ meaning bring up something that’s bothering them. “Right away, one guy—and these are all top executives—did it. He started talking about how swamped he was and how the other folks on the team didn’t realize it and were making too many demands on his time. He told them, ‘You’ve got to realize this is my busy season.’ His colleagues told him they had no idea, and had been wondering why he had been so unresponsive. Some had been taking it personally. After that there was a flood of others speaking up, getting things off their chest, clearing the air. In less than an hour it seemed like a completely different team.” “To harvest the collective wisdom of a group, you need two things: mindful presence and a sense of safety,” says Steven Wolff, a principal at GEI Partners.13 “You need a shared mental model that this is a safe place—Not, If I say the wrong thing I’ll get a note in my file. People need to feel free to speak out. “Being present,” Wolff clarifies, “means being aware of what’s going on and inquiring into it. I’ve learned to appreciate negative emotions—it’s not that I enjoy them, but that they signal a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow if we can stay present to them. When you feel a negative emotion, stop and ask yourself, ‘What’s going on here?’ so you can begin to understand the issue behind the feelings and then make what is going on within you visible to the team. But that requires the group be a safe container, so you can say what’s actually going on.” This collective act of self-awareness clears the air of emotional static. “Our research,” Wolff adds, “shows that is one sign of a high-performing team. They make it easy to give time to bring up and explore team members’ negative feelings.” As with individuals, top teams excel in the triple focus. For a team, self-awareness means tuning in to the needs of members, surfacing issues, and being intentional about setting norms that help—like “raising the elephant.” Some teams make time for a daily “check-in” at the start of a meeting to ask how each person is doing. A team’s empathy applies not just to sensitivity among members, but also to understanding the view and feelings of other people and groups the team deals with—group-level empathy. The best teams also read the organization’s dynamics effectiveWolff find that this kind of system awareness is strongly linked to positive team performance. Team focus can take the form of both whom in the wider organization to help and where to get the resources and attention teams need to accomplish their own goals. Or it can mean learning what the concerns are of others in the organization who can influence the team’s capabilities, or asking whether what the team is considering fits the larger strategy and goals of the outfit. Top teams also periodically reflect on their functioning as a group to make needed changes. This exercise in group self-awareness allows frank feedback from within, which, Druskat tells me, “boosts the group effectiveness, especially at first.” They also create a positive atmosphere; having fun is a sign of shared flow. Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, an innovations consultancy, calls it “serious play.” He says, “Play equals trust, a space where people can take risks. Only by taking risks do we get to the most valuable new ideas.